“Experts” misunderestimate our traffic, and we don’t know why

In today’s installment of “reddit needs moar money”, we visit the topic of our traffic numbers.

Here’s a screenshot of our Google Analytics page:

(Note to the Photoshop Gimp Police: The screenshots in this blog post have some of their content moved around for layout purposes, but the data hasn’t been tampered with.)

More than 8,000,000 unique visitors in the last 30 days and 400,000,000 pageviews. This is a typical month for us. In fact, our numbers would have been even higher if not for some site issues at the end of June.

These numbers are very accurate, because there’s a blob of Google Analytics javascript on every reddit page that lets them directly measure our traffic. (If this news freaks you out, here’s how to disable it.) Google seems to do a good job — their numbers match our own direct analysis of our server logs. The only significant difference is that Google includes certain categories of pageview in their total that we don’t; we think it’s fairer to report last month’s total at around 280,000,000 pageviews. But either way, it’s a very large number.

The problem is, advertisers generally don’t trust Google Analytics numbers. They have their own preferred sources of traffic information that they put their faith in. Let’s take a look at some of them.

Compete.com reports that we get around 927,000 unique visitors a month. Their page views number for us isn’t available to the public, but we’re told it’s similarly sorry-looking.

Quantcast also seems to have no option for displaying the most important category (total page views), but here’s their graph of visits per month:

They paint a picture of a visit count drooping from around 13,000,000 to 10,000,000 so far this year. It isn’t. It’s two to four times as much, and we haven’t had two consecutive months of declining traffic since spring 2007.

Alexa is just plain weird:

They don’t seem to like tallying actual totals, and instead seem to prefer to rate sites by their “percentage of total Internet traffic.” If I could find their guess for last month’s total global Internet traffic, I could multiply those two numbers together and calculate what they think our pageviews were, but since I can’t find that key statistic, I can only look at their graphs comparing us to competing sites. Those graphs seem to indicate that Alexa, too, is drastically underrepresenting the size of reddit.

Finally, Nielsen might be the cagiest of all: I don’t have a screenshot to present, but someone with a subscription to their ranking service tells us that they estimate our “Online Market Size Estimate” (whatever that is) to be 652,000.

There’s not a lot of information out there about how these places come up with their guesses, or how an underrepresented site can get them to report more realistic information. Give them a kickback? Send them a fax? Public shaming? Some kind of technical solution?

We figured we’d ask the audience.

Also, if you by any chance happen to run a major website, we have a favor to ask. Can you grep the server logs to see how many visitors we send your way, and how it compares to other major referers? That kind of information would be invaluable.